Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala

Paperback | September 1, 2004

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new in paperback"Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were "disappeared") at the hands of the U.S.-backed military government. Written by Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, the story begins in 1993, when the author decides to investigate the arson of a coffee plantation's manor house by a band of guerrillas. The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery whose solution requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely unwritten history of the country's recent civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement that was derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and to the origins of a plantation system that put Guatemala's Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American and European markets. Decades of terror-inspired fear have led the Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete it verges on collective amnesia. The author's great triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their stories, and it is through these stories--dramatic, intimate, heartbreaking--that we are shown the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that has relevance not only to Guatemala but also to countless places around the world where terror has been used as a political tool.

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Rated 5 out of
5 by
Jenna from
Wow!This book was an amazing look at what happened in Guatemala. The author went and talked to people, and began with a desire to find out why a house was burnt down, but after talking to people has a desire to find more about the history of the country, and more importantly why no one will talk to him about it. It's really eye-opening.

Date published: 2018-02-14

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Editorial Reviews

"Anyone who knows little or nothing about Guatemala can pick up "Silence on the Mountain" and be reliably filled in. Students of anthropology will appreciate its textual accessibility. Specialists, too, should not be disappointed and will surely admire the commitment and dedication that went into the book's composition." --W. George Lovell, "American Anthropologist"